Free Trade: The Next 50 years

By Alex Singleton | 11 April 2005

A new Global Growth publication has been published, Free Trade: The Next 50 Years. It is written by the excellent Dr Razeen Sally of the LSE. It is essential reading for anyone interested in development economics. Paul Staines writes the following in the forward:

Two centuries ago the Anti-Corn Law League was the first single-issue pressure group to use modern public relations techniques to promote its message. It is fair to say that the movement for free trade founded by Richard Cobden is the political ancestor of the NGOs and campaigning movements of today. Last year was the bicentenary of Richard Cobde's birth, yet the issues that motivated him then - peace, freedom and free trade - are still live political issues today.

The scourge of protectionism is again on the rise, vested interests still seek import tariffs at the expense of the greater good. Cobden successfully campaigned in parliament and across the nation for the repeal of the Corn Laws. During the first half of the nineteenth century Tory landowners sort to encourage exports and limit imports in the belief that, by this effective subsidy, they could protect Britain and themselves from competition, whatever the cost to the poor. In the latter half of the twentieth century the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy imposed tariff burdens on Europeans whilst excluding cheaper imports from the developing world. Once again it is vested interests, in particular subsidy harvesting agribusinesses, which calls upon a new generation to campaign to defeat protectionism.

It seems more than ironic that in the twenty-first century it is those who believe themselves to be allies of the poor who advocate import tariffs in the developing world. The taxes they advocate will not only act as barriers to trade between the developing and the advanced world, they will harm the interests of those they seek to help and will act as barriers to South-South trade. Most African trade is regional not global, so who will gain from hindering such trade?

The anti-free trade, anti-globalisation movement has growing influence in church circles, yet free traders in the words of Cobden "advocate nothing but what is agreeable to the highest behests of Christianity - to buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest." That poor families benefit the most from the lower prices that freer trade brings is axiomatic, but to deny farmers in the developing world higher export prices seems obscene. It is time to shift the debate beyond economics into the moral dimension. Is it morally justifiable to make it unlawful for man to trade with his neighbours in the global village and to dictate who can trade with who?